News of the week

Bitcoin Drops about 10%, Ending Stable Trading Time

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ period of recovery and stability that had endured for much of the past month has ended. The U.S. dollar price of Bitcoin was trading at $3,615.08 late Thursday, down 10.1% from a 24-hour high point of $4020.53 earlier in the day. Other major cryptocurrencies struggled, too. Ether fell 15 percent while XRP dropped 9 percent. The total market value of cryptocurrencies stood at $122.7 billion, a decline of 10.6% in the past day.

Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, has said that bills on the digital economy will be a priority during the upcoming session. Volodin stated that the digital economy bills include the ones on digital financial assets, digital rights and crowdfunding. According to the chairman, the members of the parliament will focus on these bills during the upcoming session. Volodin also urged lawmakers to create a favorable legal environment for the development of the digital economy in Russia.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation said its Blockchain Center in Manhattan will open Thursday a part of a partnership with affiliates of venture-capital fund Future\Perfect Ventures and the Global Blockchain Business Council, a trade organization. The city may also start testing the use of blockchain technology in the fall. The center is opening at a difficult time for the industry, but Ana Arino, chief strategy officer at the EDC, stated that they “are playing the long game”.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced new regulations on Jan. 10 that will compel blockchain platforms to eliminate “undesirable” content while giving authorities access to private stored data and to check the identity of users. It said the rules are built to “safeguard national security and social public interests, [and] protect the legitimate rights and interests of citizens.”

Decentralization is a more important phenomenon than blockchain, a senior executive at Samsung said in an interview with computing magazine JAX. Speaking about the future of blockchain, Ricardo J. Méndez, Technical Director at the firm’s innovative technology arm Samsung NEXT, forecast a consolidation of the space in the coming year, but underscored the importance of reshaping centralized structures.

According to a new study, Monero (XMR) is by far the most popular cryptocurrency among criminals deploying mining malware. The report by two researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and King’s College London estimated that hackers have mined at least 4.32 percent of the total Monero in circulation. The researchers, however, are not sure whether, or what portion, of malware owners have cashed out their crypto, due to lack of information and the fluctuating prices of cryptos.